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How do you follow up one of the most buzz-worthy documentaries in years? If you're Crystal Moselle, director of The Wolfpack, a shockingly entertaining doc about a family of film-loving shut-ins, you use your platform and prestige to bring attention to a cause you care about. For her follow-up, Moselle teamed up with her friend Fazeelat Aslam, producer of the 2012 Academy Award-winning Saving Face, to film a three-part series of documentary shorts that profile women affected by the water crisis in Haiti, Kenya, and Peru. What makes this project different: It was funded by a brand. Specifically: Stella Artois beer, as part of its "Buy A Lady A Drink" campaign, done in partnership with water.org. To dig in deeper, I chatted with Moselle about her new project, and how working with brands to create content could be the future of advocacy-oriented filmmaking.

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So, tell me about this new project you're working on.

Yeah. Stella contacted me to work on this project that highlights three women from Kenya, Peru, and Haiti; and their struggles with the water crisis—not having access to clean water—and showing the process of how they deal with it.

I called up my friend Faz, she's a producer who has worked on some interesting projects, one of them was Saving Face, which won the Oscar a few years ago. It became a collaboration. We went down to Haiti to really educate ourselves on the issue, and talk to women, and see what the landscape was like. While there, we found this amazing midwife named Marie and she became our first subject for this piece.

When Stella got in touch with you, did they have a specific topic in mind, or did they say, "Hey, we want to work with you, go find us a topic?"

This was already something they had in mind. They're working on their campaign Buy a Lady a Drink, and this is an issue that they've been doing for a while. This is a new direction they're going with it, making these short docs and being able to reach a bigger audience in a different way. I think the idea that we want people to empathize with these women and they want to see how they can participate and help. For me, I really felt passionate about this. It's not something that I've worked on before, but jumping into it and meeting these women and seeing what kind of change can be made, it's something that I'm excited about it.

It seems like the documentary short format is uniquely suited for the times we live in, in terms of getting things shared on the Internet and being seen by large numbers of people in a way that feature-length documentaries aren't.

I think it's a great format for this, because it's something that needs to reach as many people as possible to get the message out. With this format, it's something that can. It's less of a commitment, you know?

Yeah, you're not asking as much from viewers to watch a short documentary.

Even if it's just like: "Oh, this is the girl from Wolfpack. She did this new short film". I think people can really share the message easier. I think that it's a format that is really working in many capacities.

I have an affinity for the documentary short format. I actually made one about a year ago that caused some real-world change in a very, very different way from what you're talking about. It was about a dangerous amusement park and it caused a an old amusement park to actually change it's name, which is really different from a film about how people get water, but there's the same combination of viral capacity and quick turnaround from a production standpoint. It's sort of this loaded gun that really does make them very powerful.

Yeah. I think it's just really about finding that issue. You need a very strong character. Marie is a force of nature and she's sensational. She sings and she has this life force. It really speaks to people and I think that she's a perfect character for the short format.

What I love about the format also is, in general, you can kind of get away with making it purely character-driven, instead of trying to find a huge arc to tell. With the short format you can just throw the camera on a person and let them tell their story.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think that that's something that we're still figuring out, exactly what the story is here with Marie. I think that having these really beautiful verte moments intertwined with her story garners this creativity inside me where I'm just observing and finding those moments. It is really my style, you know? A character that has strong emotions that they can actually share is absolutely perfect for this format.

You previously made The Wolfpack, which is a feature-length movie and I'm sure you lived with for quite a while. How did that project make you a better filmmaker, or somebody who is better poised to handle a project like this?

I think that it really helped me recognize characters, and to go with my gut and continue to go after these characters that I find. Also, just being able to sit back and observe and kind of feel things out at first is really important, because I think that things will reveal themselves. You don't want to push too hard. You really just want to sit back and see how things play out.